Content Tips and Product News

Best Practices for Driving Traffic with Pinterest

There is a lot that can be said about the best practices for Pinterest: pin pretty pictures, build trust before selling, etc. In this article I’ll focus purely on

ways to attract visitors to your Pinterest boards

using your boards to drive traffic to your revenue-earning site.

1. Share Your Pins on Twitter and Facebook.

You can automate sharing by setting it up in your Pinterest profile. It brings traffic to your boards for two reasons: people love pictures, and they know that they are not being sent to a sales-related page. So they are more likely to click on your link.

2. Make Use of Pinterest’s Goodies

Especially the “Pin it” button! Drag it on to your browser’s toolbar so that it is very easy for you to pin images from other sites on to your boards.

More importantly, you want to spread the word about your own Pinterest content. The Goodies section also contains a “Follow” button. This is an HTML code snippet that can be easily pasted into a text widget on your WordPress blog or on any other HTML/PHP page.

You can also add the “Pin it” button to your posts to invite visitors to pin specific images from your site.

3. Use Free WordPress Plugins

If you have a WordPress blog add free plugins like “Pinterest Pin it Button”, which creates a “Pin it” button at the end of each post. Another interesting one is “Pinterest badge“, which adds your latest pins to your sidebar widget.

4. Place Your Boards in the Right Order

Bear in mind that western countries read from left to right. So it’s a good idea to place your “profit” boards at the beginning. You can easily rearrange boards: just click on the boards icon right of the “Edit Profile” button on the status bar above the boards.

5. Don’t Try to Sell Meat to Vegetarians. Take account of Pinterest demographics.

Boards should be clearly targeted at a specific audience, which will mean others follow you and re-pin.

The main users of Pinterest are women aged 25 to 35/45 years, who have a college education and higher-range incomes ($25,000 – $75,000).

This doesn’t mean you can’t attract other groups with a specific niche, but you won’t get as many followers. And women may also share information they find with friends and family.

You can find demographic data on Alexa, and even more details on Google Adplanner. For example, it shows that 25% of Pinterest visitors are aged 45-54. You can also see what other sites Pinterest users are visiting and their affinity to certain interests.

6. Get Viral by Pinning Images that are Repinned Frequently

Now you know the demographics, you’ll want to find images that fit their interests. A good place to go is to Repinly, where you can see the most popular re-pins and boards, as well as many other stats that help you understand your public better.

7. Use Infographics Wisely

Infographics are like posters or mind maps. They often explain a process or present products in an attractive way by educating the user without a long written text.

In most cases you probably won’t want to use them for selling but to create interest so that the user wants to learn more and is willing to pay for that information.

While beautiful, interesting images should make up the core of your Pinterest boards, it’s a good idea to place a few infographics on each one.

An interesting point about infographics on Pinterest is that visitors can’t see the details of images clearly, so they are more inclined to click through. The one above is quite big, but still not sharp. To see it clearly you’d need to click the image, so you’d be taken to the source website.

8. Create Inspiring Quotes

Those images that are re-pinned frequently tend to be creative and/or well-designed photos and images containing (famous) quotes.

Search in Google Images for “Pinterest quotes” and you will see many examples.

9. Optimize Your Pinterest Account for SEO

Don’t worry – it’s quite easy!Simply make sure you put your main keywords (the words that others could be searching for) in your profile, board and image titles and descriptions.

10. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are like tags in sites such as WordPress. You can simply put a “#” (without quotes) in front of a word in your description, i.e. #linkedin. This will add your hashtag to Pinterest’s search database and a link below your image.

If a visitor clicks on the same hashtag anywhere, then yours could show up too.

11. What About a Photo Contest?

You could create a contest for the best pin of pictures of your product or of someone (or something) wearing your logo. Other people will then start promoting your brand on their boards.

And why not use Pinterest in conjunction with another tool like Facebook to organize the details of the contest?

12. “Like” Other Pinterest Users’ Pins

As with Facebook, when you see content that you think is interesting or entertaining, give it a thumbs-up by using the “Like” feature. This may encourage the creator or poster to look at your board and perhaps even to return the favor.

13. Comment on Other People’s Pins

When you find a pin that fits with or is complementary to your niche, leave comments that people can use and will find interesting (controversial comments work too). Just one more way to drive attention to your Pinterest board.

For even more in-depth information and instructive videos you can purchase “Pins for Profits“, a course written by Richard Fairbairn (I receive no payment for recommending the course here). Some of the tips in this article are from the course.

What’s your secret for driving traffic to your Pinterest boards? And how do you use those boards to drive traffic to your revenue-earning website? Leave your comment below.